Hi I'm Tracy Tindle. I am a Year 8 Teacher at Wellsford School North of Auckland. I run a digital class where each student has an ipad. We also have a number of Mac's, PC's and an interactive whiteboard. This is the third year of our digital class. I am also a Google Certified Teacher.
In 2012 I won the Inferface Awards for Best teaching in ICT for my class Lifeforms project using Minecraft. You can check it out here: Life Forms Project
Our first week is going well. As you can see we are rocking a superhero theme this year which is going to link across everything we do. We are the only year 8 class in the school and the Superhero theme is meant to reinforce the role model ideal and hopefully help them realise their potential. So far we have been busy setting up everyones ipads with email and imessage and setting up everyone's new google docs accounts where they will be sharing most of their learning.
Its been an exciting time really as I have 5 students from last year's digital class who are my Guru's and are able to help everyone else with troubleshooting or how to do things which is great and means that I am jumping around alot less trying to get 23 others sorted out.
We have been working on our superhero topic as well by creating Superhero alter ego's and using these to create our new blogger sites. Student blogs didnt get off the ground as much as they have done in previous years so I am really wanting to push these this year and make them user friendly. Im also hoping that the kids will be able to guest oublish in our class blog and am excited about creating a bunch of reporters to hopefully attend and report on school events and tournaments.
Friday, we have a superhero challenge day where they will be dressing up as their superhero alter ego and making movies. At the moment Im toying with the idea of either a superhero imovie trailer (although I think this might be a bit easy for them at this stage) or planning, filming and editing their own superhero movie including movie trailer. No doubt it will be a fun, full on day. I just need to work out what Im going to wear! I will post the completed movies once they are done.
Week 4 Update
We have had a busy few weeks. In week 3 we were lucky enough to be invited to the Wellsford Library to work with a local cartoonist, Andy Griffiths, who has worked with Warner Brothers and now is a published author and illustrator. He worked with us to develop our cartoon drawing skills and showed us some tricks to making great cartoon images, All the kids were so enthusiastic and so well behaved. There was even a truck driver who was at the library to use the internet who was so impressed with them that he tried for days to get hold of my principal (dodgy phone reception and phone tag) to tell him how impressed he was with how well behaved and polite everyone one. Great feedback so early in the year. The kids are really taking to the Super Hero theme. I was worried that they might feel that they were too old for that sort of thing but they are really getting into the whole thing and its showing in their attitudes as well. Some have even come to me asking for more leadership roles around the school which is great,
Our Hero film making challenge day went great. There were some really spectacular efforts made with lots of effort being put into the costumes, settings and scripts. We had some great sound effects and camera angles used as well. The movies went down well at our assembly as well.
Our amazing Art teacher has also taken on our Super Hero theme and created these incredible artworks with the class last week. So awesome are they that we've had kids from all over the school coming to look at them and everyone has said how awesome they are and they all want to draw super heroes for their own art lessons!
In 2012 I won the Inferface Awards for Best teaching in ICT for my class Lifeforms project using Minecraft. You can check it out here: Life Forms Project
Our class Blog: My Class Blog
Our classroom wiki: www.misstindlesclass.wikispaces.com
Levels of integration
My Classroom
Our first week is going well. As you can see we are rocking a superhero theme this year which is going to link across everything we do. We are the only year 8 class in the school and the Superhero theme is meant to reinforce the role model ideal and hopefully help them realise their potential. So far we have been busy setting up everyones ipads with email and imessage and setting up everyone's new google docs accounts where they will be sharing most of their learning.
Its been an exciting time really as I have 5 students from last year's digital class who are my Guru's and are able to help everyone else with troubleshooting or how to do things which is great and means that I am jumping around alot less trying to get 23 others sorted out.
We have been working on our superhero topic as well by creating Superhero alter ego's and using these to create our new blogger sites. Student blogs didnt get off the ground as much as they have done in previous years so I am really wanting to push these this year and make them user friendly. Im also hoping that the kids will be able to guest oublish in our class blog and am excited about creating a bunch of reporters to hopefully attend and report on school events and tournaments.
Friday, we have a superhero challenge day where they will be dressing up as their superhero alter ego and making movies. At the moment Im toying with the idea of either a superhero imovie trailer (although I think this might be a bit easy for them at this stage) or planning, filming and editing their own superhero movie including movie trailer. No doubt it will be a fun, full on day. I just need to work out what Im going to wear! I will post the completed movies once they are done.
Week 4 Update
We have had a busy few weeks. In week 3 we were lucky enough to be invited to the Wellsford Library to work with a local cartoonist, Andy Griffiths, who has worked with Warner Brothers and now is a published author and illustrator. He worked with us to develop our cartoon drawing skills and showed us some tricks to making great cartoon images, All the kids were so enthusiastic and so well behaved. There was even a truck driver who was at the library to use the internet who was so impressed with them that he tried for days to get hold of my principal (dodgy phone reception and phone tag) to tell him how impressed he was with how well behaved and polite everyone one. Great feedback so early in the year. The kids are really taking to the Super Hero theme. I was worried that they might feel that they were too old for that sort of thing but they are really getting into the whole thing and its showing in their attitudes as well. Some have even come to me asking for more leadership roles around the school which is great,
Our Hero film making challenge day went great. There were some really spectacular efforts made with lots of effort being put into the costumes, settings and scripts. We had some great sound effects and camera angles used as well. The movies went down well at our assembly as well.
Our amazing Art teacher has also taken on our Super Hero theme and created these incredible artworks with the class last week. So awesome are they that we've had kids from all over the school coming to look at them and everyone has said how awesome they are and they all want to draw super heroes for their own art lessons!